Iranian and US scientists keep channels of communication open

Burton Richter told the sponsors of his recent eight-day visit to Iran that he wasn’t going to go there just to talk about particle physics. The retired director of SLAC insisted that the topics to be discussed include energy, specifically nuclear energy.

But the Nobel laureate had no inkling that he would spend an hour with Gholam-Reza Aqazadeh, one of Iran’s vice presidents and its top atomic energy official. The Iranian official, Richter said, “clearly was sending a message” for him to pass along to the US authorities: Iran will consider suspending its uranium enrichment program, but only as part of negotiations covering other issues of “mutual interest,” including resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stabilizing Iraq and other strife-torn Middle East nations, and countering illegal drug exports from Afghanistan.

“My interpretation is that they think that we want some things from them, but they want some things from us,” said Richter, “and in negotiating a package deal, they would have more negotiating power than if they were just to go to the nuclear thing and do a deal with us.” He added, “[Aqazadeh] said the US attitude toward nuclear matters is one where we are ready to tolerate anything from members of our club but not willing to tolerate a peaceful program from someone not in our club.” Examples, Aqazadeh told Richter, include nuclear weapons in Israel, the US nuclear agreement with India, and US weapons sales to Pakistan.

Richter’s visit was one of a dozen or so exchanges between US and Iranian scientists and engineers that have been brokered and partly financed by the National Academies over the past 10 years. Glenn Schweitzer, who manages the program at the academies, said the visits are meant to encourage Iran to participate in the international science and technology arena. Each visit requires months, and sometimes years, of advance work, Schweitzer said. Depending on the particular focus of the visit, approval may need to be obtained from the State, Commerce, or Treasury departments if goods, services, technology, or funding is transferred. In Richter’s case, no permission was required.

Diplomacy not a goal

Schweitzer insisted that diplomacy is not among the program’s goals, although the enrichment issue has arisen on several occasions in recent years during visits sponsored by the National Academies. Delegations are not required to file reports of their trips with the State Department, but the academies regularly discuss the Iranian program with appropriate officials at State, he said.

Richter said an official at State told him that his visit marked the first time that a negotiating signal had been sent from the vice presidential level and also the first time that the Afghan drug trade was included on Iran’s list of mutual concerns. The State official, an adviser to the acting undersecretary for arms control and international security, didn’t return calls for comment. The US hasn’t responded directly to such overtures from Iranian officials but continues to insist publicly that Iran must suspend uranium enrichment as a prerequisite to talks on other issues. The ultimatum “is an absolute nonstarter” for the Iranians, said William Wulf, former president of the National Academy of Engineering, who led a delegation of scientists and engineers to Iran last October. Wulf said that every government official he spoke with, including former president Mohammad Khatami, insisted that Iran isn’t interested in nuclear weapons. One source said that Iranian leaders are very interested in presumed Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who has said he would be open to bilateral talks without preconditions.

Having no diplomatic relations with Iran, the US has been channeling its communications with the country through the so-called five-plus-one nations—the five permanent United Nations (UN) Security Council member nations plus Germany. In June, after Richter had returned home, the six nations presented a package of incentives to Tehran, hoping to coax the suspension of uranium enrichment. At press time there were conflicting reports on the Iranian response to the incentives, but tensions were further heightened by Iran’s test-launching of missiles capable of reaching Israel and bellicose statements issued from the two nations.

A delegation of seven American earthquake experts did not meet with government officials during a June trip to Iran. The six-day visit included a workshop, hosted by Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, that focused on upgrading the earthquake resistance of Iran’s largely adobe and unreinforced masonry building stock. Especially urgent, according to William Anderson, a National Academies official who led the trip, are the tens of thousands of schools in Iran that need structural upgrades, a fact tragically underscored by the catastrophic quake in China’s Sichuan Province just weeks before. With a population of 12 million, Tehran is among the most earthquake-vulnerable big cities in the world. Anderson said that although the national government has committed $4 billion to retrofitting buildings, progress has been slow, and the Iranians are hoping for technical assistance to accelerate the process. The US delegation also visited the city of Bam, site of a 2003 earthquake that killed approximately 30 000 people.

Iranians visit US

Last fall a group of 20 Iranian scientists traveled to the US to discuss with American colleagues the topic of food-borne diseases. Although the trip was organized by the National Academies, the State Department took care of the domestic travel and accommodation arrangements for the visitors. Following a three-day workshop in Washington, the Iranian scientists were shuttled to several laboratories and research centers around the country. One participant, Habib Bagheri, a chemistry professor at Sharif, said by e-mail that the program was “first-class” and “very fruitful for me.” It wasn’t the first US visit for Bagheri, who spent a sabbatical year at Purdue University, where his research resulted in two publications. “I believe scientific relationships could be very important for the two nations and hope that they will be continued,” he said.

Maryam Sanaei, a researcher at the Shaheed Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, said that although she was disappointed the workshop didn’t touch on her particular research topic, she was impressed by the prosperity of the country and its research institutions, and added, “I wish I were in your land again; thank God and your government for this opportunity.” Hosein Dabiri, also of Shaheed Beheshti, said he and his colleagues have been trying to establish ongoing collaborations with US scientists, but they have been unable so far to get a response. He lamented that even educated Americans view Iran “more badly than it is.”

Wulf went to Tehran last fall with a goal of broadening bilateral scientific collaborations. He said such cooperative arrangements have been encouraged by the State Department as a “backdoor channel of communication” between the two governments. The American delegation, which included Nobel physicist Joseph Taylor of Princeton University, was asked by Iran’s vice president for science Sadegh Vaez-Zadeh to cooperate with Iranian colleagues in monitoring and deterring harmful applications of science. In response, a bilateral effort to be initiated next year will look for misuses of nanotechnology, cybertechnology, biological research, and other scientific applications. Separately, the National Academies and Sharif will initiate an exchange of science policy experts later this year or early next year, Schweitzer said.

Warm reception

Despite escalating US–Iranian political tensions, Richter, Wulf, and others all reported warm receptions from faculty, students, and the general population. Wulf, who first visited Tehran in 2000, said he was curious to see if Iranian attitudes toward Americans had turned negative after seven years. He found they hadn’t: “We were welcomed then, and we are welcomed now.” Taylor was “treated like a rock star,” he said, with 1400 students packing into a room with only 400 seats to hear his lecture.

“Scientists and engineers share a set of values that is independent of culture,” Wulf remarked. That is particularly true at Sharif, he added, where 80% of faculty members were educated in the US.

Richter saw no evidence of the military or of an overbearing religious presence in either of the two cities he visited. He added that the country appeared to be prospering despite economic sanctions, although there was some evidence that the most recent round of UN-imposed sanctions might be beginning to pinch. Anderson said that he and his fellow travelers had steeled themselves for a possible hostile reaction from Iranians, but their hosts “couldn’t have been more cooperative and friendly.”

While at Sharif, Richter participated with top Iranian officials from the energy and environmental fields in a public roundtable discussion on those topics. He observed that from an economic perspective, it makes sense for Iran to adopt nuclear energy for its domestic electricity needs and to sell its abundant oil to the world market. Richter also was interested to learn that Iran had witnessed a 1 °C rise in its minimum annual temperature since 1950. With a climate similar to California’s, the nation has counted on the winter snowpack from the mountains to meet its water needs during the warm months. Aware of the change looming if snow turns to rain, Iran is now planning to erect more dams, he said.

As for physics, Richter found a strong theory program in particle physics, particularly in string theory. (See the Opinion piece on physics in Iran, Physics Today, May 2008, page 51 .) Experimentally, Iranians are participating in the Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and have a cosmic-ray program. A 3-meter telescope is also under construction.